


Mission Accomplished

by aurilly



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Crossover, First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Mutual recovery from brainwashing chairs, Pining, Post-Recovery Bucky Barnes, bucky in narnia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:54:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26179090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: Bucky comes back injured from a mission he went on to help Rilian.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Rilian (Narnia)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20
Collections: Alternate Universe Exchange 2020





	Mission Accomplished

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/gifts).



The sound of his bedroom door being unlatched woke Rilian from a troubled, unsatisfying slumber. Whoever entered possessed a catlike tread, but stood on two legs, taller than any rearing leopard. 

Rilian leaned over the side of his bed and grasped the hilt of the sword he kept tucked between his two mattresses. He hopped out of bed and pulled it out in the same motion.

“Who goes there?” he asked.

In the darkness, a match snapped. A candle was lighted. Above its flickering flame, Rilian saw Bucky’s shadowed face. 

“Hey,” Bucky said.

Rilian sat back down on the bed and sighed with relief. 

He had not wanted Bucky to go alone on this mission, to risk his life for a man who was not even his king, and a country that was not his own. But, using the full range of his confusing other-worldly colloquialisms, Bucky had told Rilian how catastrophically stupid it would be for Narnia’s king to take part in such an ugly job, no matter how necessary it was. Bucky has done this before, he’d said. His place had always been to manage the unsavory so that others could move forward to something better.

It had sounded like a terrible role, both in his world, and now in Rilian's. Dealing with treasonous conspirators and the dark magic they were trying to summon against Narnia was more than Rilian had wanted to ask of a new friend. He had worried, for Bucky and Narnia alike, during all the days of Bucky's absence. But now Bucky was back, walking stiffly, and looking dazed. But he was _alive_ , which was all that mattered.

“You gave me a fright,” Rilian said, because he could not say all the many other things in his heart.

“Feeling afraid just means you're sane," Bucky said. "And I feel a lot better now about your safety now. If I’d been anyone else, someone who wanted to hurt you, I actually think you could’ve taken them, stupid nightcap and all.”

Embarrassed, Rilian snatched the long hat from his head and threw it behind him, off into the darkness. 

“Well?” Rilian tried to sound crankily commanding, even though all he wanted to do was embrace his returned friend. He lit two more lamps and set them on the night table next to him. “How did it go?”

“I took care of it. They won’t bother you ever again. It’s over.”

Rilian heard the sadness and self-loathing more than he heard the words. He knew what it meant. He knew that in order to help him, and help Narnia, Bucky had done things he had never wanted to do again. 

"Will you tell me about—"

"Not tonight, if that's okay. I will, another time, but… That's okay, right?"

“Of course it is. I will say thank you, for now, if I may. But I will not trouble you further than that." Rilian coughed and repeated, with as much meaning as he could muster, "Thank you."

"No problem. I just came to check in and let you know I was back, and that it’s been taken care of. I should…" Bucky gestured to leave, to return to his own room, in another wing, farther away than Rilian could suddenly bear him to go.

"No. Come. Sit. You must be weary, friend. You can stay here tonight, if you please.” Thinking of a better excuse than his neediness, he added, "It would not do for others to find you in this battle-hardened state during this night."

“I’ll get mud and blood all over your sheets.”

“Damn the sheets.”

"Oh, all right. Fine." 

One by one, and with exhausted slowness, Bucky removed his sword, sword belt, numerous knives hidden around his person, his traveling cloak, his shirt of mail, his tall boots, and his leather riding kilt. Even in the low light, Rilian could see that Bucky's linen shirt stuck unnaturally to his skin, and was stained an unsightly colour, worse than dirt.

"You've been wounded," he chided, and immediately ran to fetch his basin of water and a few clean cloths. "Off with this shirt."

"It's not a big deal," Bucky grumbled, even though he complied.

Rilian lit even more lamps until the room was fully aglow. Now that he could see better, the wound looked even uglier than he had feared. 

"You've been stabbed clean through!"

"Looks worse than it is. They didn't hit anything vital. I'll heal by tomorrow. I always do."

"I don't care. This is a dirty wound, and I will not allow my soldiers to care for themselves so ill. Lie down, sir."

Bucky must have been tired, or else all of Rilian's practicing of a kingly tone must finally have borne fruit, because Bucky's usual recalcitrance melted away. He collapsed onto the pillows, with nary a retort.

Rilian began dabbing the wound with water and a touch of soap and iodine. His father had instilled in him the importance of thoroughness in wound care. 

(And, well, if following best practices allowed him to dance his fingers across the strong, beautiful lines of Bucky's body… let it never be said that following the rules failed to gratify.)

Bucky's breath hitched, and his body arched upwards, and he swallowed a strange noise. 

"Have I hurt you?" Rilian asked worriedly. "The wound is even worse than it looks, isn't it?"

"No, it's just… I'm a little ticklish."

Rilian marveled at this. At the idea of Bucky—the strongest, most impressive warrior Rilian had ever imagined—being susceptible to a silly, child's weakness. To test the theory, he prodded his fingers between two of Bucky's ribs. Sure enough, Bucky gasped and arched uncontrollably upwards, practically breathing into Rilian's face, mouth close enough to kiss.

"Stop, stop, please, god, you bastard," Bucky choked out between poorly suppressed bursts of laughter and groans. 

Rilian stopped, because he would fain hurt his most loyal, most beloved warrior more than he had already been hurt in Rilian's service. But his heart beat quickly, and not only with mirth. 

“I know you said you no longer wanted to fight," Rilian said a few moments later, when they had both calmed again. "I am sorry if, in my service, you felt obliged to do anything that—”

“It had nothing to do with you. They were bastards. Worse than bastards. I wouldn’t have been able to look at myself in the mirror if I’d sat out that fight. Actually, it was easier than I thought it would be.”

Rilian scooted himself closer and held Bucky’s metal hand, which lay on the bed between them. “Do not misinterpret the meaning of that. Fighting is always easy if we believe in the cause. It does not mean that you are still theirs. It does not mean that that is who you remain.”

Bucky shrugged. “I know. I guess.” 

"Do not guess."

"Yeah, okay." Bucky said, but this time he sounded a bit more confident, a bit more like himself. He lay quietly, eyes tracking Rilian's movements as he submitted to gentle care. He clenched his chiseled stomach muscles a few times when the iodine stung, licked and bit his plump red lips distractingly, flexed his metal fingers against the satin sheets, and moaned in pleasure-pain ways that forced Rilian to gulp.

It was a wonder Rilian remembered his training at all. Never had he been rendered so flummoxed by a patient. He focused on his task for longer than was strictly necessary, even longer than he would have for someone without Bucky's healing factor. He wiped the wound more times than was required, wrapped the clean bandage around Bucky's abdomen more times than the wound called for. All the while, Bucky's eyes shifted questioningly between Rilian's hands and face. 

"I think that will hold," Rilian announced quietly when he could no longer sustain a plausible reason for keeping his hands on Bucky's body. 

"Thanks. It would have been fine by tomorrow, but… thanks."

"It is the least I can do. You have rendered me such a service. I will never be able to repay it. I…" 

Perhaps it was the soft lamplight, or perhaps it was gratitude blossoming uncontrollably, or perhaps it was simply the presence of Bucky all sweaty and grubby and half-naked in Rilian's bed, but instead of finishing his sentence, Rilian leaned forward and placed a soft but unmistakable kiss to his friend's lips. 

Bucky stiffened in surprise. He did not deepen the kiss. He did not move at all. Rilian simply felt him take a sharp inhalation. That seemed enough of a signal to stop, and so Rilian pulled back. For a fleeting millisecond, he imagined that Bucky's head followed his, but no, that could not be right. 

“I apologize,” Rilian said quickly. “I should never have done that. I have never wanted to make you feel uncomfortable. Please do not let it change anything between us.” 

“Did you mean it? I mean, do you really want…” Bucky rubbed at his face, and, in a rare moment of awkwardness, stumbled over his words. “I don’t even know what I’m asking. I probably sound like an idiot.”

“You don’t sound like an idiot. You never do. But I beg of you, put it out of your mind. I will continue to endeavour to do the same. Things will be as they were, I promise. That was a momentary lapse, but I _can_ and have suppressed it. I will continue to do so.”

Rilian steeled himself for Bucky’s brand of casual yet polite charm to smooth it all away, to pretend that he’d barely noticed anything, and say that it wasn’t ‘a big deal’ (Bucky's his most maddening phrase). 

“Why?” Bucky asked instead.

“What do you mean?”

Rilian tried to pull his hand away, but Bucky clenched gleaming fingers and wouldn’t let him. “Why were you suppressing? Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to feel beholden to pleasing me.”

“Why would I?”

“Because I am the king, and you might think I required—”

Bucky laughed. “Rilian, I’m an American. From what I've pieced together, all the kids who've come before me were English. But I'm not like them. I don’t give a fuck about monarchy. Anything I do for you, I do because I _want_ to, not because you're the king. The second you ask me to do something I'm not into, I’ll tell you no, same as I would with anyone else.”

“If you say so. But it doesn’t matter. All of this is irrelevant. I know you don’t feel similarly.”

“You’re lucky you’re pretty, because you’re none too bright.” 

Just as Rilian opened his mouth to bristle at the insult, Bucky leaned in to muffle his response with a surprise kiss. Now that he was kissing back, Bucky’s lips proved every bit as soft as they had looked in Rilian’s guilty glances from across rooms and dining tables. 

“Anything else on your mind?" Bucky whispered into Rilian's face when next they came up for air. "Any other reason why we shouldn’t do this? Let's tackle all of it right now.”

Rilian felt a strange bubbling of elation mixed with trepidation. He knew that he was being teased, at least a little bit, but he had always had a hard time turning off the spigot once he had begun to unburden himself. It _would_ be better, he knew, if they could address all of the issues right from the start. 

So, he said, “There is also the fact that the last time I felt an attraction to someone this strong, it ended spectacularly poorly.”

Bucky paid him the favor of not laughing. Instead, he said, with the graveness of the Marsh-wiggles who had cared for him during his first few days in Narnia, “I know it’s a pretty low bar, but I promise I will never kidnap you, brainwash you, and keep you underground until it’s time to conquer your own country. If there's anyone in the world—in any world—you can trust not to do that, I think you know it's me."

Expressed in Bucky’s charming deadpan manner, the concern _did_ sound silly. But Rilian grew solemn again when his last reservation came to mind. 

"One day, you will leave," he said. "The visitors from your world always do. I have barely begun to recover from losing ten years of my life to the Witch. I do not know if I could recover from losing you, too. Each step we take forward will result in an extra league's worth of pain later."

"I'm not going anywhere." 

"You don't know that. You cannot promise that. It is Aslan's will, and he—" 

"And he told me after the mission that I don't have to leave."

"You _saw_ Aslan?" Rilian gasped at the wonder of it, even more than the promise Bucky was trying to make. Rilian, for all that he had had _two_ sets of champions from the world of men come to his aid, had never spoken to Aslan. 

"Yeah. He kind of… it's hard to explain… he's the reason I got back so fast. He carried me, but I'm not sure if we were running or flying or what. Anyway, I asked him about this. I know I'm only here because you needed help and blew that horn. I asked if I was going to be sent back now that the job I'd been called for was done. And he said, no, not necessarily. I'm not a kid, he says. From what it sounds like, they're all so young, and he wants them to get to live in their own world. My world. But I've already lived my world. And it was the pits. From what I can tell, all my friends are dead. I've got nothing to go back to. I'm like your Lord… what's his name… the one stuck on Nightmare Island."

"Lord Rhoop," Rilian offered automatically, as he had for his father (who truly never did retain that one's name) so many times.

"Right. Rhoop. I'm Lord Rhoop, and Narnia is my… whatever island your mom was from. I get to rest here as long as I need. Or want. With you. If you're into that."

Rilian leaned forward again and nipped at Bucky's lips, at his nose, at his steel-cut cheekbones. "I am very much 'into that'," he said, finding one of Bucky's odd colloquialisms apt, for the first time ever. 

"Good," Bucky said between kisses. He must already have been feeling in less pain, because he pulled Rilian down on top of him and rolled them into an entangled mess of limbs, with knees and elbows and ribs pointing in places that Rilian _knew_ Bucky had hurt. "I'm glad to hear it," he continued, "because there's some stuff I've been wanting to try."

"Such as?"

"Gimme until tomorrow when these bandages come off," Bucky said as he tugged upwards on Rilian's sleep shirt, making what was a fairly obvious request. "Then I'll show you."

Rilian sat up just long enough to tear it off before wrapping himself around Bucky once more. "I will hold you to that promise."


End file.
